Sternenkinder

(Where they don’t belong)

How the idea and the image developed

“At some point in their lives most women must deal with the possibility, impossibility, or fact of becoming pregnant. It can be something a woman has been longing for all her life or something of great fear. It can be a fruit of a loving relationship, an accident or a result of violence. Pregnancy links the most intimate aspects of a female’s body with the ideas about the wellbeing of the social body.”

During the past few years I was able to experience and document the pregnancy of several family members and friends closely. The joys, hopes and expectations, as well as the worries and struggles that emerge along side it. However, sadly, on several occasions, those wonderful occurrences turned into the women’s and family’s worst nightmare when they had to find out that for some unexplained reasons the being that was forming in the mother’s womb was no more.

With 19 I was first confronted with a miscarriage when my older sister lost Emma at 12 weeks. I still remember seeing her sitting on a mattress in the “orange bedroom”, holding her 2 years old son in her arms, crying and trying to explain to him that his little sister wanted to be in a better place and was now one of the stars in the sky with all the other star children (Sternenkinder).

In November 2008 my best friend had to experience the same misery when losing Felix at 9 weeks and it was the point that I, for the first time, had to realise that losing an unborn child was more than just a “malfunction” of the female body, it led to something far deeper inside a woman’s heart, which I can hardly understand nor feel. It was then that my journey for this final major project began. The research of the issue of miscarriage and the loss of a child led me to the question of how it could be represented within the arts and a way in which I, as a person from the “outside”, could relate and reflect on it and show my feelings and thoughts towards it.

At the beginning of my project I was very focused on one idea, which was working with ultrasound imagery and heartbeat recordings as well as interviews of affected women. During this progress I was also writing on “Counter Photography – The representation and exploration of pregnancy and its forced and natural causes of loss” which helped me to look at the whole thematic of pregnancy and loss in a bigger picture. I learned that I had to handle this whole subject with an incredible gentleness and that the mentioned way of representation would be too direct and overpowering.

During a visit to Germany that was supposed to lead my project further into one direction, I experienced a rather shocking setback. Planned interviews had been cancelled and an expected openness by affected women turned into silence and rejection.

A note in my workbook states: “I am surprised about the outcome of my trip. I did not manage to get a single piece of work done the way I expected it. (…) However, when I started my trip I was open for anything that could happen. …”

One of the outcomes of this trip were images taken during a visit to a cemetery which showed items grieving parents left behind on the small graves of their children to express their feelings of loss. These items were mainly baby toys and little angles.

I decided to develop this idea further and started photographing at a Southampton cemetery and capturing scenes that would best represent the way I was feeling about the death of a dead child. Additionally, sadly only a few days before a couple of friends had to let their one week old daughter go, which placed me, once again, right into the centre of the project.

The final image shows wind chimes in a big, green tree in wonderful colours and one can only imagine the beautiful ringing sound they make when moved by a soft wind. Those items represent the beauty that children are, the movement are a symbol for freedom and one might even suggest that they are might be the little spirits of the children. … The background, however, takes the viewer to the location and raises the awareness of the contrast between place and items, hence the title “Where they don’t belong”. Cemeteries are seen as very sacred, quiet and rather grey places, therefore, finding all those colourful and “ringing” items seem, somehow, odd and out of place.

I believe that “Sternenkinder (Where they don’t belong)” is a very strong image that deals in a sensitive way with the topic. It stands as a symbol for my, and other’s, feelings and sympathy for the pain parents are going through after losing someone so dear. Furthermore, it takes the place of all the children I never had the chance to meet and is a sign for their mothers to let them know that their children will not be forgotten..